There’s a really interesting piece on Tim Worstall’s Substack this week. It has a title that is practically guaranteed to spark debate, especially among the people who don’t read past the headline: Starvation Is Caused By An Insufficiency Of Billionaires. It’s an exercise in the motivated use of statistics and the old saw, “Correlation does not imply causation.”
From the pictures, it’s clear that the places with lots of hunger have few billionaires; places with lots of billionaires have less hunger.
Now, there’s a reason that “correlation doesn’t imply causation” is a common saying — which is commonly forgotten or ignored by people who have their own agendas, but that’s a rant for another day.
But the opposite is true. A negative correlation can imply causation. If you listen to Leftists, they will tell you that billionaires become billionaires by stealing from the poor, downtrodden masses.
They have some reason for that — all in the world of the Left. Go to the old Soviet Union, and the rich, the people with dachas and limos and going to Black Sea resorts were the politically connected. Look at Russia today, and it’s much the same — and then there’s Fidel Castro’s family. And Hugo Chavez’s family. And an infinitude of others. They do get rich on the backs of the downtrodden masses. If that’s the example you’re looking at, it’s easy to see how people might mistake kleptocrats for the cause of poverty — they too often are.
But if that was the only way, then all the places with lots of billionaires would have lots of downtrodden masses, and instead, we in the United States both have the most billionaires and have reduced hunger to the point that obesity is a problem for the poor. And for the rich, honestly. (Again, that’s a rant for another time, but it was the government telling us we had to eat more carbs and less fat.)
To quote Worstall:
Those with many billionaires and little to no hunger are those places which have, largely enough, followed a roughly capitalist and free market economic policy for the past few decades. It doesn’t take all that many in fact – China in 1978 was a grossly poor, zero billionaires and very hungry place. Now it ain’t. India didn’t change policies until the mid 1990s so it’s still catching up.
It’s pretty much a rule. Look at Cuba and Castro.
Those places with the few billionaires and lots of hunger are those that have not been largely and roughly enough capitalist and free market these past four or five decades. They have instead been following anything from proper full on communism through to the feeble idiocies of Fabianism and the University of Sussex’s economic development proposals.
The Fabians may not be familiar. They were a “democratic Socialist” group that started in 1880, and included members like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells and were instrumental to the founding of the Labour Party that Sir Keir Starmer is running into the ground this very day.
Worstall has a suggestion.
Having done the QED thing we’re now just left with what our policy proposals should be. Shoot the Fabians and blow up the University of Sussex. All those in favour?
Take that, George Bernard Shaw.
The kleptocrats are still around, in people like AOC and Rashida Tlaib. PJ Media is part of the real resistance.
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